All About Alice: Ashley Greene

The Twilight Saga's Ashley Greene moves from rising starlet to full-blown glamour girl—and dishes about her romance with Joe Jonas.

It's not easy being Greene. Or rather, as Ashley herself says, it isn't always easy. Yes, the winsomely pretty 23-year-old has a supercute boyfriend (one Mr. Joe Jonas) and a sizable role in the ultrasuccessful Twilight series, but that doesn't mean that life is a nonstop cakewalk for the actress. "There have definitely been low points," she admits. "Moments when I sit in my hotel room and want to cry! It's fun," she says of her fast-paced profession, "but it's a lot of pressure. If you're tired or run-down or having a rough day or missing your friends and family, you can't just call in sick." Right. The show, as they say, must go on.

But Ashley seems energized and downright cheery on the day of her Teen Vogue interview, which is conducted over a breakfast of scrambled eggs and tofu at the Crosby Street Hotel in downtown New York City. She's recently signed a lease on an apartment nearby—she has another in Los Angeles, to which she moved when she was just seventeen—and plans to spend the afternoon scouting couches with her father, a construction-company owner who's flown
in from her native Jacksonville, Florida, to help. "Bless his heart," Ashley says. "He's getting the electronics together for me right now because he knows the deals and I know nothing."

The new place, Ashley says, boasts a number of advantages, and the relative proximity to her family is among them. But she seems equally thrilled about the
chance to live and work in the city. "I'm very much a girl that likes to have options," she explains. "That's the way I am with fashion, and that's the way I am with my life. In California, I do like to just chill out and go to the beach, but I love the energy here. I feel very productive when I'm in New York."

And being productive, she says, is key to her current definition of happiness. "I'm a bit of a workaholic," Ashley explains. Despite her earnest admission that success in Hollywood does have its downsides, she loves her job. "When I feel like I'm not doing something, it drives me insane," she says. Part of the urgency seems to come from Ashley's sense that she's at a sort of magic moment in her career, on the cusp of the kind of megafame that her costar Kristen Stewart found with the release of the first Twilight film. "This industry never stops," she says. "Right now I'm in this amazing place, and there are open doors. I think it would be foolish to take a month off. So many people would kill to be in my shoes that it's just bad karma!"

Ashley has no fewer than five films slated for release this year, starting
with 1983-set coming-of-age story Skateland, which premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival and hits theaters this month. "I play Michelle, who's about to graduate from high school," she says, "and I'm kind of facing the ups and downs of that. I think it's a very relatable film—we have love, loss, and heartbreak." She's even more excited about her turn in the upcoming comedy Butter, in which she appears opposite Jennifer Garner and Olivia Wilde. "It's about butter carving, which, really, you have to Google," she says. "People take these huge chunks of butter, as tall as me, and carve intricate things into them; it's mind-blowing. I'd never heard of it when I read the script, and I remember asking my manager, 'How do writers make this stuff up?' But it actually exists." In the movie, Ashley says, she plays a "typical rebellious teenager who goes from plain vanilla to basically being a stripper. It sounds ridiculous but it's going to be really funny."